How is the ageing population influencing UX Design

When you are starting a digital product design project, one of the first things you need to ask are - Who am I building this for? What is my target audience? Who is the end-user interacting with it? And probably the most significant factor - How old is him or her? And yes, it can either be a person, a group of people, a community or even not people at all.

Although it might sound odd, the age factor is one of the most important considerations when it comes to developing a User interface and analysing the User experience of a new product.

Well my friend, as surprising as it might seem to you age-responsive design has become a trend nowadays. No… not just the regular responsiveness that we all focus on when it comes to designing interfaces that need to be knit and perfect in every device. I guess we only value issues and conditions that come with ageing when we actually struggle with them, right? Wrong!

Over the past 10 years I have came across multiple clients wanting to build the so called “lovely websites”, looking clean, minimal and consistent across multiple platforms, most of them with that preconceived and almost prophetic phrase “mobile first”, benchmarking us with examples of what they like, usually so similar, sometimes so challenging that it was almost impossible to come up with interface designs that they hadn’t seen before. In fact, we all enjoy and love clean and white landing pages, minimalistic and with imerssive backgrounds and fancy fonts to spice things up. And that’s Golden, they would say. But is it really? Is it working perfectly?

Well, it does to some extent. Probably only for a generation of users.

Let’s put it this way, the mind of a 9 years old boy and a 65 years old lady function in a completely different way. Behaviours, ease of gestures, eyesight, interests, taste, tech interaction patterns, knowledge and experience are completely distinct. And what about teenagers, young adults, generation X, Y and Z, baby boomers - Gosh there are so many - you can see how it gets complicated. And yet almost 75% of designers worldwide design mainly for millennials. In fact, most of the designers being hired as UX Designers are actually inside the millennial generation. Eventually these are the people that actually create the online trends today, so even the designers on the high end of the profession have converted their own taste into this community of influencers. Call back to the websites that all look pretty much the same. It figures…

Then the question is, how can you stand your business out from the crowd when it comes to this issue?

In short, every people inside each generation uses the web in different ways and has completely different expectations when it comes to success criteria dealing with a digital product. A funny commercial of people falling from the stairs and using Bepanthene to treat their bruises is definitely not the best way to approach an elder lady who has back problems and can easily fall. Or even a full width and height banner can be in major showstopper for a mature adult who is used to websites that have small sections to be able understand they are scrollable. The fact of being trendy doesn’t mean it is serving the target user accordingly.

Here are a few tips and tricks for good age-responsive UX/UI Design:

• For elderly or people with eyesight problems, remember to use larger font sizes and spacing.
• For the Baby Boomers, keep it easy, simple and classy.
• Think of adaptability and voice commanded features for people with disabilities.
• Design with well contrasted colours for color blind people and remember that colours are not the only factor if you want to make it easy for them. Icons maybe?
• Develop interactive features and recur to bright colours for children.
• For Generation X follow a more robust and stylish path.
• Oh and not just for millennials… For anyone really… save people’s time and invest in less clicks and more conversion.
• For teenagers and young adults invest your designs in building interactions with and on the social networks.
• Last but not least, remember that old rule all UX designers should have in count - “Don’t make me think” - you don’t need to reinvent the wheel and there is nothing wrong with using pre-built principles that already work and are famous in the web, you just need to use them cleverly.

On a final note, do not forget to track and monitor who the users are and how they are interacting with the site. There is an immense bunch of tools that make the process easy and make a huge impact moving forward and refining your product, service and message accordingly.

I am sure there should be a few others that I know I’m forgetting at the moment, but you can get the gist. In summary, remember to focus on your main target audience but don’t just focus on making it work for that persona. If it works, it should work for many others, you just need to have these key pieces of the puzzle together to make it work. Most important is to keep refining as you go and build it with a purpose of converting your audience into a community and start dialoging instead of just sending a message.

Hopefully this article will help you through your journey of understanding how to design better for age-responsiveness. If you liked this article please don’t forget to share with your boss, business colleagues, friends and family.